Print volume 68, Number 1

Ocean currents and maritime traders first brought coconuts to nearly every tropical coast. Now global food producers are bringing them to nearly every grocery shelf. Heritage cuisine, health fad or a little of both? Five recipes from five lands can help you decide.

Photographer Matthieu Paley was in Southeast Asia working on stories about the evolution of the human diet when he made this picture. "I was visiting traditional, self-sufficient communities to see how food shapes daily life. My host was named Marita. She was inside preparing food as I arrived."

When she governed the Moroccan coastal city of Tétouan, the Spanish accused her of organizing piracy, while at home she won respect from both Moroccans and post-1492 Andalusian émigrés. On land and sea, hers was a life charted by crisis.

Late in his life, one of the most celebrated minds of the European Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, donned Turkish attire. It was a personal expression of the mobility between Western Europe and the Muslim world—and the new ideas these crossings engendered, which he articulated in writings that changed history.

In 2008 Kathy Garms, a teacher in Elkader, Iowa, led the launch of a student essay contest in honor of her town’s Algerian namesake, Amir Abd el-Kader. In September this year’s seven winners received scholarships.

That is how “Iqaluit” translates into English from the Inuit language. It’s the name of Canada’s smallest territorial capital, just 8,000 people on the chilly shores of Frobisher Bay, a town governing a polar archipelago half the size of Western Europe that is Canada’s largest—and newest—province, Nunavut. Once a frontier for fishing and hunting, later for whaling and the fur trade, Iqaluit today is a fast-growing outpost on the world economic stage.

Ocean currents and maritime traders first brought coconuts to nearly every tropical coast. Now global food producers are bringing them to nearly every grocery shelf. Heritage cuisine, health fad or a little of both? Five recipes from five lands can help you decide.

Photographer Matthieu Paley was in Southeast Asia working on stories about the evolution of the human diet when he made this picture. "I was visiting traditional, self-sufficient communities to see how food shapes daily life. My host was named Marita. She was inside preparing food as I arrived."

When she governed the Moroccan coastal city of Tétouan, the Spanish accused her of organizing piracy, while at home she won respect from both Moroccans and post-1492 Andalusian émigrés. On land and sea, hers was a life charted by crisis.

Late in his life, one of the most celebrated minds of the European Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, donned Turkish attire. It was a personal expression of the mobility between Western Europe and the Muslim world—and the new ideas these crossings engendered, which he articulated in writings that changed history.

In 2008 Kathy Garms, a teacher in Elkader, Iowa, led the launch of a student essay contest in honor of her town’s Algerian namesake, Amir Abd el-Kader. In September this year’s seven winners received scholarships.

That is how “Iqaluit” translates into English from the Inuit language. It’s the name of Canada’s smallest territorial capital, just 8,000 people on the chilly shores of Frobisher Bay, a town governing a polar archipelago half the size of Western Europe that is Canada’s largest—and newest—province, Nunavut. Once a frontier for fishing and hunting, later for whaling and the fur trade, Iqaluit today is a fast-growing outpost on the world economic stage.

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Under Arab, Portuguese, German and English rule, commerce and the town’s strategic location on East Africa’s coast made Bagamoyo a leading port from the 1300s to the late 1800s. Now Tanzania has unveiled a 30-year plan to transform the town and environs into the largest seaport the coast has ever seen and link it, once again, to the rest of the Indian Ocean and China.

Beyond the shadows of Dubai’s skyscrapers lies working-class Satwa, and along its main drag Al Diyafah, a treasure-trove of restaurants serves up a hemisphere-spanning selection of Asian and Near Eastern home-cooking.

Written by Ingrid Bejarano Escanilla and Louis Werner
Art by Belén Esturla

Over his 90-year lifetime, this chronicler of fact and unabashed fancy trekked, sailed, caravanned, studied and traded from the far Arab West to the northern- and easternmost reaches of the 12th-century Islamic world.

When a hand stencil-painting in the caves on this island recently dated to 39,900 years ago, Indonesia took a place alongside France and Spain as a site of the earliest known representational art. Now we must ask not only how and why we began making pictures, but how and why we did so on two continents, at the same time.

To reconstruct memories of her late father’s generation, the artist and author interviewed her father’s peers and made artifact-based portraits of his “unique generation that saw Saudi Arabia at its poorest and later at its richest,” a generation that understands “what it means to build your dreams from scratch.”

It started out as many successful businesses do: with a bit of vision, a prime location and some family connections. From its first Arabic text in 1732 to today, Brill’s books helped build the scholarship of what is today broadly called Middle East and Asian studies.

When Arab Muslims came to rule formerly Byzantine lands in the mid-seventh century CE, they continued using local coins and only gradually issued their own: The story was similar in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. Viewed through a numismatist’s magnifying glass, it was an age not only of conflict and change, but also of accommodation and pragmatism.

Paved with stones that, according to one Roman writer, “give the appearance not simply of being laid together ... but they seem to have actually grown together,” the Via Egnatia joined East and West under empires both Roman and Ottoman. Much of its 1,100-kilometer length can still be walked and driven, from original-stone footpaths in Albania to a superhighway in Greece.

Born in a refugee camp in Kenya, 19-year-old Somali-American designer Sahro Hassan has won awards as well as acclaim in her hometown of Lewiston, Maine, for “modest fashion” that can appeal to Muslim and non-Muslim women alike.

Strategic and even glamorous at times over 196 years, the American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, is today a neighborhood cultural center where young and old improve reading and writing and learn new skills.